Riverbed, OPNET partner to enhance WAN visibility

OPNET Technologies and Riverbed Technology have announced their intention to deliver capabilities for real-time monitoring and troubleshooting of wide area network (WAN) applications accelerated by Riverbed.

The combination of Riverbed Steelhead appliances and OPNET's ACE solutions for application performance management will provide customers with a complete offering for enhanced visibility into applications accelerated by Riverbed. It will allow customers to more effectively optimise network performance by identifying problem areas for applications, measuring end-to-end application delivery, and enhancing troubleshooting and problem resolution.The combination of OPNET's intelligent analytics and reporting with Riverbed WDS will allow customers to maximise bandwidth allocation, plan server/storage deployments and ensure SLAs are met. Through their partnership, Riverbed and OPNET will collaborate to enhance the scope of capabilities that can be leveraged by users to more effectively optimise and manage their WAN environments.The two companies are also engaging in joint sales and marketing efforts. OPNET has joined the Riverbed Technology Alliance (RTA) programme, a group of complementary technology companies who share a common vision of accelerating data and application performance and delivering significant savings as customers increasingly use WANs to enable global business.Riverbed Steelhead appliances help organisations overcome the problems of poor application performance and insufficient bandwidth by accelerating all TCP-based applications over the WAN. By speeding up the performance of applications up to 100 times, award-winning Steelhead WDS products from Riverbed enable companies to consolidate IT, improve backup and replication processes to ensure data integrity, and improve staff productivity and collaboration.OPNET's ACE solutions provide integrated real-time end-user experience monitoring and deep-level troubleshooting for networked applications. ACE Live delivers an end-to-end solution that spans monitoring, measurement, and detection of application performance violations, providing visibility of all transactions and users across the enterprise. OPNET's ACE Analyst complements ACE Live with expert knowledge about network protocols and application behaviour as seen from a network perspective.The combination of ACE Live and ACE Analyst enables IT organisations to detect performance issues, perform triage across all transactions, and pinpoint and remedy specific issues before they severely affect business operations."Our respective customers have chosen solutions from OPNET and Riverbed because they want to invest in best-in-class technologies for network and application performance," says Marc Cohen, OPNET chairman and CEO. "Our collaboration promises to deliver even greater benefits for our customers."Says Christo Briedenhann, country manager: South Africa, Riverbed: "This partnership will help Riverbed better meet the needs of its customers by providing enhanced visibility and management of applications over the WAN. By obtaining true visibility, our customers are better able to make strategic decisions about IT projects, such as consolidation efforts. We're looking forward to our ongoing work with OPNET to provide our customers with solutions that meet their ever-changing needs."